# Plating These settings control the plating details of the spaceship. There are also other controls like enabling shading effects to alter the look of your ship in render.

These are the **Plating** properties and what they do: ### Plating This lets you set the number of plating details in the ship.

### Size The size of the plating detail randomized between the values of the min and max properties.

### Tolerance Determines if plating detail can expand over sharp edges based on face normal angle threshold.

{% hint style="info" %} *This works like the **Cut Method: Wrap** in the **Random Panels** operator in **Random Flow** which allows the panel islands to grow beyond or wrap around sharp angled edges.* {% endhint %} ### Adjacent Faces Using **Clear** when generating plate details will avoid overlapping other plate details to create more relaxed ares. Using **Fill** will pose no limits and create more details if possible.

### Even Offset Turns on or off even offset when extruding the plate details using the **Depth** property. Having this on ensures the extruded faces maintain a similar area. If you encounter geometry spikes, disable this option to resolve the issue.

### Thickness This determines the thickness or scale of the plate details. You can toggle the chain icon to get this value to randomize between the mix/max properties.

### Depth This determines the depth or extrusion distance of the plate details. You can toggle the chain icon to get this value to randomize between the mix/max properties.

### Margin Type Determines which margin type to use for the plate details. **All** means margin can be used on embossed or debossed plate details. **Indent Only** means margin can only be used on indented or debossed plate details.

### Margin The amount of margin or boundary for the plate details.

### Reverse Depth This contains two properties: **Amount** and **Seed**. The Amount property is a percentage value that specifies the number of plate details that will have their depth direction inverted. The Seed property is used to randomize which plate details are affected.

### Limit Smooth This lets you set the face normal shading for the ship. **None** means no special shading used, **Base** will mark the boundary edges of the plate details as sharp and the top faces as smooth and **Top** will mark the boundary edges of the top faces as sharp and the boundary edges of the plate detail as smooth.

### Shading This property will show up after using **Limit Smooth: None** and will let you choose what basic face normal shading to use for the ship. This has three options: Smooth, By Angle and Flat.

{% hint style="info" %} *These are the basic or default shading options in Blender that you can also find in the W specials menu.* {% endhint %} ### Plating Seed The random seed control for all the properties in the **Plating** section that can be randomized.

This feature allows you to quickly create detail by means of geometry and to also easily break the smooth profile of the ship leading to more interesting silhouettes. This also generates UV for the ship by uv marking the boundary edges of the plate details.

Even the wings generated are uv marked automatically so this effect becomes seamless even when adding both the large and small wing extrusions.

The resulting UV is a great starting base for you to do little fixes to come up with the perfect UV map and it's definitely better than starting from zero.

You can decide to not use plating details and create this effect using texture displacement, bump or normap map. You have to UV this manually but its easier without the complicated geometry of the plating details. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://www.blenderguppy.com/add-ons/random-starship/functions/plating.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.